Stewart’s character also says he posed as a cattle rancher for months with no clue as to who committed the murders, a direct contrast to the sloppy, obvious work of some of the real killers that went unsolved due to a blatant lack of investigation. Perhaps worst of all, the murders in “The FBI Story” end up being attributed to one lone man, a character named Dwight McCutcheon (Fay Roope), who’s caught due to some silly typewriter-related forensic science. It’s a gross mischaracterization, one that reimagines systemic, coordinated killings as detective fiction. In this sense, it would’ve been a great project on which Scorsese could build his final closing point about the shoddiness of true crime retellings.
The “Killers of the Flower Moon” ending we got was still breathtaking, though. Scorsese says the film’s last lines were originally meant for another actor, but he decided to read them himself, a choice that lent the film a tremendous amount of gravity and self-awareness. “As I was repeating [the line], I’m thinking about the lineup of the graves of the mother, the sisters, the father, and the little girl,” the filmmaker told EW. “I said it. I did it. And finally everybody froze and said, ‘That may be it. Maybe it’s okay. Just go with that, rather than ending it in a conventional way.'”